Ann Manwaring represented Halifax, Whitingham, and Wilmington in the Vermont House of Representatives from 2007 to 2017.
WILMINGTON-Vermont's publicly funded education system is a community-based, statewide system tied together by its financing structure. It includes both public and private schools.
For any system to serve those who benefit from it and those who pay for it, three things are required: sound financing, effective governance, and transparent accountability.
Prior to Act 60 and Act 68, all three conditions existed in every Vermont school district - tested and renewed at every Town Meeting. When Act 60 was enacted in 1997 and adjusted by Act 68 in 2003, these laws restructured only the financing. Governance remained largely unchanged.
But the accountability loop, in which voters could question the outcomes of the prior year's spending before approving new expenditures, was broken, and was never replaced.
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In February, Kaj Samsom, commissioner of Vermont's Department of Financial Regulation, wrote a compelling opinion piece arguing that existing frameworks for delivering education reflect a "structural lack of accountability and misaligned incentives."
Samson identified the same problem in housing and healthcare, but it is education that is driving property taxpayers' alarm and occupying the Legislature and governor today.
The power of accountability depends on the questions asked - and answered - before voters or their representatives authorize taxes and spending.
In my 10 years in the Legislature, including six on the Appropriations Committee, I saw how the legislative appropriations process functions as an accountability loop for the general fund, into which Vermonters' income taxes are deposited, and for the transportation fund.
The education fund, supported largely by property taxes, operates outside that loop entirely.
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It remains to be seen what this year's legislative and administrative actions will produce. What is emerging appears to be, yet again, a reconfiguration of governance and an adjustment to how money flows into and out of the education fund.
What it does not appear to address is systemic accountability for the outcomes that money is meant to achieve, nor does it treat the system as a bottom-up, community-based enterprise best guided by carrots and sticks rather than top-down mandates.
The current conversation continues to frame local communities - the very people responsible for results on the ground - as the problem, as though overspending were a matter of local bad faith rather than structural incentive.
It does not reckon with the governor's and the Legislature's own roles - new laws enacted over decades which have driven expenditures upward across the entire system. The Joint Fiscal Office's authoritative annual publication "Fiscal Facts" tracks the fiscal impact of new laws on the general fund and the transportation fund - but not on the education fund.
This is a systems failure, not a partisan dispute. It has persisted through every administration and legislative majority since Act 60. Continuing to treat it as anything else only prolongs the problem.
Absent explicit requirements for transparent, ongoing evaluation of savings from governance restructuring and for measurable student outcome changes tied to a foundation formula, the system will remain unable to deliver its full value: educating Vermont's children at a cost taxpayers are willing to sustain.
This Voices Viewpoint was submitted to The Commons.
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